by Alan, Craig
“Get her some water.”
Someone pressed another bandage to her collarbone. The mask was lifted, and a tube pressed to her mouth. Elena was so weak that Wen had to squeeze the bulb to help her drink. She sloshed, and water spilled between her lips and into her nose.
Elena was spun again, and now she could see Marco pull Vijay’s body out of her stateroom. The bleeding had stopped, but round globs of blood followed him into the corridor.
Marco reared back and spat in Vijay’s face.
“Don’t touch him!”
“But Captain. What he did to you . . .” She saw the tears in her boatswain’s eyes.
“He did what he thought was right,” Elena said. “It’s time for us to do the same.”
Hassoun gasped, and Demyan and Vladlena Lamentov crossed themselves, right to left.
“Officer Lamentov, you’re dismissed,” Ikenna said. “Take my post at forward control.”
Lamentov left so quickly, eyes locked on the pale, bloody apparition that had once been her captain, that she forgot to salute. Rivkah and Wen eased Elena into the flight station and gently strapped her in. Ikenna took Lamentov’s place at watch.
“Chief Nishtha?” Demyan asked.
“No,” Elena said, as Wen tied the plasma bag to the chair behind her head. Rivkah pulled the hypo from her neck, and ran a new peripheral line into her bicep. Elena could feel the warmth spread from her heart to the tips of her fingers and toes, and her torso was now a dull, constant ache from neck to waist. “Well, yes. Hassoun, open the personnel files. I need to know if there is anyone else on this ship with no parents, no children, no partners.”
Hassoun did as he was told, forehead creased.
“Just Chief Nishtha, Cap’n.”
Elena nodded. Her mouth hung open and she breathed deeply.
“How are the neighbors?”
“Metatron wants to know when we will transmit our access codes,” Hassoun said. Their computer cores were completely identical, and once Metatron was inside there would be no hiding from her. She’d find the evidence, and destroy it. “She’s hailing us again.”
Metatron hovered a few kilometers away, guns trained on her sister from across the ghost ship which lay between them. Every weapon was hot, and at the tips of the missile pods a pair of radio jammers hummed with energy, ready to shatter the silence. She had deliberately taken the outside track. If Gabriel lit her rockets and made a hard burn, she would fly straight past her sister, and deeper into outsider territory. And if Gabriel attempted to somersault and make a break for home directly, Metatron could cut her down instantly.
“Mr. Masri, give her my answer.”
The radio pulse was so weak that Metatron didn’t hear it. When Elena and her crew had left Gideon, they had closed the hatch to the bridge. But they hadn’t closed any others. The radio wave penetrated just deep enough into the hull to reach the engine room, and the receiver that Elena had connected to her thruster pack—and the explosive bolts packed in alongside it.
They blew at once and ruptured the propellant tank inside the pack. The explosion pierced the fuel cell, and the hydrogen inside ignited. It brewed up and shattered the bridge and the fuel cells on either side, and they detonated like twin aftershocks.
Gideon erupted before their eyes. The fireball flamed out in the vacuum, and the scorched wreckage flew apart in every direction. Metatron seemed shocked by the immolation, as if the outsiders had rigged their ship to self-destruct.
Demyan lit the engines and burned. Gabriel darted through the explosion. Waves of incandescent gas rolled from her hull like liquid fire. By the time Metatron had realized what happened, Gabriel had shot past her, and out of the torus.
“Buzzers active,” Hassoun said. “All frequencies inoperable.”
Metatron’s radio jammers lashed the surrounding space with energy bursts, and flooded the entire band with senseless noise. Even if Gabriel broke the eclipse and sighted the Earth, she would be mute.
“If the outsiders didn’t know before,” Elena said. Control was only twenty light-minutes away, and the battle would be over before they hardly knew it had begun. “Where is she?”
“In pursuit,” Demyan said, “one hundred kilometers, aft port quarter.”
“Ikenna, now.”
Gabriel dropped a single missile on the path behind her, but Metatron didn’t follow. She veered to port and slid into a lane that sliced across the arc that would take her sister home. The missile, now aimed in the wrong direction, blazed harmlessly into space. It was so distant that Metatron didn’t even bother to take a shot at it.
“Distance now one hundred fifty kay,” Demyan said.
“Can we maintain this course and speed?” Elena asked.
“No, ma’am,” Demyan said. “We’re off by almost one hundred and eighty degrees. We run dry now, and the next stop is Saturn.”
“What if we cut the engines, rotate to home, and fire again?” Hassoun asked.
Demyan shook his head.
“It would slam the crew flat against the deck,” he said. “We’d black out.”
“Put another missile across her bow,” Elena said. “Try to force her to turn aside.”
Ikenna fired, and shook his head.
“No impact, clean splash.” Metatron had shot it from her path.
Rivkah hovered next to her, replacing the sodden bandages. During the burn she’d held onto the bottom of Elena’s chair to keep from being thrown against the aft bulkhead, the plasma bag gripped in one hand lest the line tear free.
“Is Metatron lining up a shot?”
Ikenna put the image of the enemy ship up on the holo. She was flying bow forward, ballista aimed straight ahead, and not at Gabriel.
“Not yet, Captain. Her rockets are still burning.”
“She fears losing us than she wants to kill us. Hassoun, keep an eye on her jammers. I want to know the moment we can burn through it.”
“Aye, Cap’n.”
“Ma’am,” Demyan said, “we need to adjust our trajectory soon if ever want to see the Belt again.”
“But if we cut the engines or slide into a turn, we’ll be giving Metatron an easy shot,” Ikenna said.
“We can’t keep going, we can’t slow down, and we can’t turn aside,” Elena said. “So what does that leave us?”
Gabriel’s thrusters fired, and her bow tilted—not to port or starboard, but down. She dove beneath the plane of Jupiter’s orbit. Metatron scrambled to restore her aim. She spun sharply and took a hopeless shot as Gabriel as plummeted towards the southern pole. Metatron took the curve with her stride for stride, now high in space above her.
“Metatron has matched course, one hundred twenty kay.”
Demyan breathed heavily. The g-forces had squeezed the air from his lungs.
“Now we’re only ninety degrees of target,” Elena said. And Gabriel’s momentum was still carrying her away from Earth—that would take more than a few burns.
Elena put a hand to hear pounding heart, and it came away dark and sticky. Rivkah lifted it gently from the bandages, and then placed two fingers beneath the shelf of Elena’s jaws. Her dark eyes were invisible in the gloom.
“Captain, Metatron is coming about. She’ll have a firing solution in less than thirty seconds.”
Elena decided not to wait.
“Demyan, roll to port, forty five degrees. Ikenna, rip her wings off.”
Gabriel spun onto her side so that her sail pointed straight at Metatron and brought four of her guns to bear. A rain of fire leapt up and slashed Metatron across the belly. The first rounds chopped at the armor and cut into the sails. Streams of fluid trailed from the punctured radiators and boiled in space. Metatron returned fire, and Gabriel spun again and stood on her tail to face her.
They hacked at one another as they fell. Metatron’s bal
lista opened up, and the shell punched a round hole through Gabriel’s milky wake. She parried with her own shot, and watched as Metatron used her shield to turn aside the sword. Three guns drew down on the cannonball and shoved it off target by a degree. It missed by the hair’s width of a kilometer.
“How long does it take us to recharge after a ballista shot?” Elena asked.
“Seventy two seconds,” Ikenna asked.
“She might be faster.”
“The hell she is.”
Elena smiled, and spoke to Rivkah.
“Remember how bad that last burn was?”
“Yes.”
“This one will be worse. Get against that wall and lie flat on your back, with your shoulder against the joint. Don’t try to hold your breath. The suit will do the rest.”
“These foams are dissolving,” Rivkah said, as she patched up the wound at Elena’s clavicle. “Your heart is eroding them with every beat. I’m not leaving you.”
“You won’t even be able to move.”
“I’m not leaving you,” Rivkah said again.
Elena nodded, and tapped her console. The four bridge chairs rotated and leaned back into a supine position.
“Hassoun, up the oxygen, all compartments. All hands, brace for acceleration.”
Dozens of bullets struck Gabriel every second, and chunks of antenna, telescope, and solar panel tumbled behind her autumn leaves. Each of the Archangels’ guns emptied a barrel of ammunition every sixty seconds, and their hulls were pitted and worn from the impacts. They rolled as the fired, and the gunfire twisted into coils that wrapped around their bows like flaming wreathes.
Gabriel charged just as Metatron thrust. She raced into the gunfire and allowed it to rip the skin from her flesh. The ballista round passed beneath her, where she should have been. It was close enough to see from the outer hull, a streak of white light like a shooting star. Each ship salvoed a pair of missiles. But the hailstorm of bullets found them immediately and cut them down before they could even arm, and the mangled metal corpses were swept aside.
Elena’s lips peeled back from her teeth. She couldn’t have shut her eyes if she tried. The weight of the air pressed down on her lungs, and if not for the fifty parts concentration of oxygen in the bridge atmosphere she would already have been unconscious. Elena watched as drops of dark blood flattened against the ridges of her blue uniform, ran along them in rivulets, and disappeared off the edge of her body to splatter against Rivkah. The doctor hung in midair, strapped to the chair by a pair of taut safety lines, held fast against the inside of her own spacesuit.
“Metatron’s not burning?”
“No, Captain,” Ikenna said. “We’ll pass her by in fifteen seconds.”
She waited until the very last moment. Metatron swung to one side, and laid her nose across Gabriel’s path. Her rockets ignited and threw her forward.
A wake of white hot plasma unspooled behind Metatron as she cut across. Gabriel sailed into the exhaust and tore through it, and left ghostly vapor swirls to eddy and froth where she had cut it in two. The moment of impact had been so brief that no human mind could have perceived it. In that instant, Gabriel had nearly been crippled.
“Damage report!”
“Radiators inoperative, Cap’n,” Hassoun said. The cooling sails had been coated in fiery vapor, and their heat was trapped. “We’re boiling, it will take at least ten minutes to get them back online.”
“Cut the engines,” Elena said. The rocket plumes died, and Gabriel coasted, her acceleration lost. “Fuck. Metatron?”
“Three hundred kilometers and closing, ma’am,” Demyan said.
“Are we out of jammer range?”
“No,” Hassoun said. “We still have to fight through Metatron and Jupiter. I can’t a signal out.”
“Captain, we’re coasting,” Ikenna said. “Metatron is at hard burn and will be within range in minutes.”
“Demyan, hit the avram. Push us down and out. And keep us head on to Metatron at all times.”
“Cap’n, we can’t fire the ballista without radiators,” Hassoun said. The colossal magnetic coils would flood the ship with waste heat and flash boil the moisture on their skin.
“I’m aware of that, Hassoun.”
The avram activated and Gabriel fell from Jupiter, further into its outer orbit. She rotated and flew sideways to keep the ballista trained on Metatron, who watched her go without offering a challenge. She knew that she had scorched her sister and left her feeble. There was no need to hurry. She circled warily, two hundred kilometers, one hundred, fifty. She closed for the kill.
They attacked at the same instant. Metatron shot her ballista at close range and broke off the pursuit. All four of Gabriel’s forward guns opened up, and she loosed her final four missiles, one for each point of the compass.
Metatron’s shell lunged for Gabriel and hit a wall of steel as the guns brought their fire to a single point on its surface, and chewed it to pieces. The round dissolved in mid flight, and a splash of molten metal spattered against Gabriel’s bow and dribbled down the length of the hull. She had made no attempt to evade.
The missiles blazed and hunted Metatron down. The first missed cleanly, and self-destructed dozens of kilometers beneath her. Metatron walked her fire onto the second and smashed it in a spray of metal. The final two converged, and leapt together into the streams of fire between they and their prey. They detonated simultaneously, and hit Metatron like the twin blasts of a shotgun.
Hot shrapnel clawed the hull and dug long gouges down her body. Exposed telescopes and radio dishes shattered under the onslaught Bursts of vapor erupted from the hull as a half dozen compartments collapsed at once. A chunk of mail cut a sail nearly in half, and a wrecked missile body glanced into Metatron’s shoulder and buried itself in the armor like a meteor fallen to earth.
“Impact,” Ikenna said. “Multiple breaches, but she’s whole. Scratch damage.”
“Fuck.” Elena would trade four missiles for a kill, but not for a wound. Her pods were now empty. “Where is she?”
“Fled to a safe distance,” Ikenna said. “One hundred kilometers above and to starboard.”
“Radiators coming back online,” Hassoun said. He looked up, and he was smiling. “And the jamming has ceased.”
“It worked after all. Do you have line of sight?”
“No, Cap’n, we’re still behind Jupiter.”
“Demyan, can you set a course for home?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Hit it.”
Gabriel went to hard burn once more, and sprinted towards the daylight. From high above, Metatron tilted down onto her nose and fired her ballista at long range. Gabriel shifted to port, and the shell never got close. Next came a pair of missiles, also to port. Gabriel killed them with ease. Metatron made no further effort to close for a better shot as Gabriel drifted away from her, now hundreds of kilometers distant.
“She’s not even trying,” Elena said.
“I’m not complaining,” Hassoun said.
Five minutes had passed, and still Metatron lurked above her, as if she were afraid to close. Another shell passed to port, and once again Demyan dodged to starboard.
“She can count, she knows we’re dry. Metatron carries two pods, just like Gabriel?”
“Yes, Captain,” Ikenna said. “Eight missiles.”
“But she’s only fired four so far,” Elena said. “Porque? Is she afraid of wasting ammunition?”
“Maybe she has less than we think,” Demyan said.
Elena saw a black tunnel, boiling with smoke, Pascal Arnaud’s lifeless body at the bottom.
“Countermeasures, now!”
Infrared flares exploded from Gabriel in every direction. The canisters of chaff burst, and clouds of burning magnesium bloomed around her and clothed Gabriel in the sun. M
etatron had nudged her gently to port, and into the pair of missiles that she had lain there, before the rendezvous. They ignited and gave chase.
The first was transfixed by the trail of flares Gabriel had left behind, and broke off the pursuit to hunt ghosts. The second wasn’t fooled at all, and homed in. Gabriel’s guns knocked it out of the sky, but they couldn’t hold back the wave of shrapnel that broke upon her. Their impacts punched craters into the armor and rose from the hull like geysers.
“I can’t fucking believe that worked twice,” Elena said.
“T-5, T-6, T-7, T-8, P-8, all breached,” Hassoun said. “The core is undamaged. A few more locked down, but hull intact. Casualties coming in.”
“Get Marco down there to fix my damn ship.”
Hassoun clicked his keysticks, and swallowed. He didn’t look up.
“Montessori is dead, Captain,” he said.
The bridge was quiet for a moment. Rivkah touched her hand, and Elena turned. She had almost forgotten the doctor was there beside her. Black spots ringed her vision.
“There are other casualties,” the doctor said.
“Go, bueno.”
Rivkah let her hand linger for a second, then nodded and scooped up her bag. There were still three other people left on the bridge when the door closed behind her, but Elena suddenly felt very alone.
“Maintain course, Captain?”
Gabriel had swung hard to starboard, away from Jupiter, and Metatron had once more moved to cut off her path. Her ballista fired, and Gabriel dodged. Metatron was herding her again, out to empty space where only the outsiders would find her.
“Delta-v?”
“The tanks are low. Five minutes of hard burn left,” Demyan said. “Rounding up.”
Gabriel didn’t carry enough propellant to sprint for long. She was nearly exhausted, and when the tanks ran dry, she would fly wherever she was pointed last. By now the first faint inklings of radio noise would have reached the asteroid Pallas. It might be another forty years before humanity sent another ship to Jupiter.
“Captain?” Demyan looked up for the first time in nearly half an hour. “Should I maintain course?”